During 'Scandal' hiatus, Morton will await fate

Thursday

Dec 12, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 12, 2013 at 5:15 PM

LOS ANGELES (AP) - It's going to be a long, cold winter for the gladiators, and perhaps even longer for Joe Morton, who plays the debatably diabolical dad Rowan Pope to his political-fixer daughter, Olivia (Kerry Washington).

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It's going to be a long, cold winter for the gladiators, and perhaps even longer for Joe Morton, who plays the debatably diabolical dad Rowan Pope to his political-fixer daughter, Olivia (Kerry Washington).

After the "Scandal" episode airing Thursday (10 p.m. EST) on ABC, the series won't return with fresh installments until late February — a scheme to avoid holiday-time ratings doldrums and also to dodge competition from the upcoming Winter Olympics.

When last we left "Scandal," Sally had killed her husband, Huck had tortured Quinn, and Liv was sending her evil mama to a continent far, far away.

But the play's the thing for the Bronx-born Morton, a Tony-nominated Broadway vet who frequently has returned to work on the stage.

"What is wonderful about working on 'Scandal' is that, I believe, almost every member of the cast working on that show are all theater actors," he noted. "So what that gives us all is, certainly, a very familiar vocabulary, so that we can work much more efficiently with one another."

Actor-to-actor, Morton perhaps deals most frequently with "Scandal" star Washington, who has earned an Emmy nomination for her work on the series. On Wednesday, she garnered a Screen Actors Guild nomination for the role and on Thursday morning, picked up a Golden Globe nod for best actress in a television drama.

"If Kerry never wins an award for her entire career, but she works until she feels she doesn't want to work anymore, then she's got the biggest award ever," Morton said.

With 40-plus years of hopping from live-theater to television to film roles, Morton knows whereof he speaks.

But he doesn't know everything.

"When you play a character as seemingly evil as Rowan is, yes, you always have to think: 'Either they are going to let this character survive, or they're going to kill him,'" Morton explained. "So, we have to see what happens."